In Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People," Hulga spends her whole life denying and rebelling against her mother's hopeful attitude. Hulga is a thirty-two-year-old with a Ph.D. who lost her leg in a hunting accident at the age of ten and who also suffers from a heart condition. Still, living with her mother makes her have a bad outlook on life and those around her. O'Connor uses Hulga to show how a strong feeling of insecurity and lack of reality can harm different relationships.
             Despite Hulga's impairments, she believes she is smarter and above the rest around her.
             There seems to be some kind of symbolic attachment between Hulga's "weak heart"(133) and her lack of relationships. She resents the fact that she is living at home instead of lecturing at a university where people would understand her. She punishes her mother every day by the rudeness she exerts. Hulga, "had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people"(133). Mrs. Hopewell neither acknowledges Hulga's pain nor does she make any attempt to comfort her. Mrs. Hopewell says, "People who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not"(133). Hulga considers herself ugly, and after her accident when she was of legal age was when she made the decision to change her name from Joy to Hulga, she feels it suits her personality: "She had
             arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her, she saw it as, her highest creative act" (132). Mrs. Hopewell's refusal to call her Hulga shows' her denial of Joy's change. Hulga does not have much use for men either. According to her mother, she looks at them "as if she could smell their stupidity"(133). Mrs. Hopewell al
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